Floor traders could read emotions and watch order flow in real time, spotting panic and recognizing which traders consistently made money. Electronic trading stripped away those visual cues, making it harder for newcomers to learn what actually works.
The thing with floor trading, and I've been talking with a lot more senior traders now, a lot more veterans that traded on the floor, and they said when there was a floor, almost everybody that they started to train became profitable because it was easier to read emotions in the room, easily see orders in the room. You could see people panicking, you could see people loading up on shorts as a high gets taken out. So it was easier to see the order flow. But now, plus you could see their patterns because you'll get to know these people. Exactly, exactly. You know somebody that is consistently profitable and he's always shorting yesterday's highs. You're mostly likely gonna just hop on board. When everything switched to electronic training, it became much harder.
